Semiconductor History | Kokusai Toyama — The Batch Furnace Turns Vertical
· 1989
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Semiconductor History | Kokusai Toyama — The Batch Furnace Turns Vertical
kevin
Kokusai Electric’s predecessor businesses entered semiconductor manufacturing equipment in 1956 and introduced a diffusion furnace in 1964. In 1985 they commercialized the VERTRON vertical CVD and diffusion system; four years later, Toyama Works began operations as the production base for a technology that would become central to the company’s identity.
Thermal processing changes wafers through heat and carefully controlled gases. A vertical batch furnace stacks many wafers inside a tall reaction tube, then runs oxidation, diffusion, annealing, or film-deposition steps with controlled temperature and flow. Turning the furnace upright reduced cleanroom footprint and helped manage particles and wafer handling while preserving the economic advantage of processing many wafers together.
The good was disciplined scale. Batch tools could deliver repeatable films across scores of wafers, making them valuable for memory and other high-volume processes. Toyama concentrated manufacturing, assembly, and improvement around a demanding class of equipment. This was another Japanese route to semiconductor influence: not designing the chip, but perfecting a machine whose uniformity and uptime affected every die in a batch.
The bad is embedded in batching. If temperature, gas flow, contamination, or a recipe goes wrong, many wafers can be affected at once. Long cycles create work-in-process risk, and batch architecture can be less flexible than single-wafer tools for rapidly changing or highly differentiated steps. Equipment demand is cyclical, customer qualification is slow, and Kokusai’s corporate lineage passed through mergers and ownership changes that could distract from long-horizon engineering.
The Toyama pin marks the plant that opened in 1989. The cover is a licensed photograph of generic diffusion and oxidation furnaces at LAAS in Toulouse, made by Centrotherm—not Kokusai equipment. It is used only to show the physical logic of a vertical furnace bank; the manufacturer and location difference are explicit.
Sources: Kokusai Electric corporate history, company profile, business description, and Toyama location information.
Photo: “Centrotherm diffusion furnace at LAAS 0489,” Guillaume Paumier, CC BY-SA 3.0. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Centrotherm_diffusion_furnace_at_LAAS_0489.jpg
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